Social Search

I just read Mark Gibbs' Networkworld column about the social search engine Aardvark. Like Yahoo Answers, Aadvark polls experts for answers, rather than consulting a structured database.

Another category for social search is a database like Delver.com, where the content is drawn from social networking site content. As it indexes Facebook, Linkedin, and various blogging sites, this appears to be a great tool for finding people.

One cumbersome aspect of using these tools is that they seem to require a login. And the credentialsof the "experts" may sometime be suspect.

^-D.D.